(NaturalNews) In the weeks leading up to the Nov. 6 election, there were scattered concerns from across the political spectrum that vote fraud could occur in some sections of the country. While many of those fears did not come to fruition, based on final vote tallies in some polling districts, it's hard to fathom that some form of fraud did not occur.

Take Philadelphia, for instance - the "city of Brotherly Love" - where, once again, New Black Panther Party members were seen at some of the same polling places they were at in 2008, when charges of voter intimidation were leveled against them. In 59 districts around the city, GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney got zero votes.

Zip. Nada. None.

Granted, in heavily Democratic urban districts in the city, it's not unusual for that party's candidate - in this case, President Obama - to win a heavy proportion of the vote. But all of them?

Sure, say analysts. It's not unusual at all. Nothing to see here.

Saddam Hussein always got nearly 100 percent of the vote too

"We have always had these dense urban corridors that are extremely Democratic," Jonathan Rodden, a political science professor at Stanford University, told Philly.com, a joint website of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News newspapers.

"It's kind of an urban fact, and you are looking at the extreme end of it in Philadelphia," he said.

That's because most large cities are 75-80 percent Democrats, making them practically politically homogenous and much easier to organize than, say, rural areas where folks live far apart, said Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.

"One reason Democrats can maximize votes in Philadelphia is that it's very easy to knock on every door," she said.

But isn't it just as easy to knock on doors in Republican strongholds, even if they are farther apart? And that's another issue - if we are to believe there are Democratic "corridors," doesn't it follow that there are Republican "corridors" as well?

Some GOP officials are asking these very same questions, especially after learning that, in 59 Philadelphia voting districts Obama out-polled Romney by a stunning 19,605 to zero. Even in heavily Democratic Philly, are we to believe that in nearly 60 polling districts there is not a single dissenting voter? The last political candidate in recent member to poll that overwhelmingly was Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Those districts were concentrated in overwhelmingly black sectors of the city. But again - not a single Romney supporter? Not even one?

That's a huge stretch, to say the least, says Steve Miskin, a spokesman for Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

"We believe we need to continue ensuring the integrity of the ballot," he said, referencing his party's voter ID initiative that, perhaps not surprisingly, was held off the state ballot for this election.

No such thing as a 100 percent Republican voting precinct

University of Virginia political scientist Dr. Larry Sabato, who has studied voting in African American-dominated precincts, told Philly.com he had occasionally seen instances where 100 percent of the vote went to the Democratic candidate, citing precincts in Chicago and Atlanta which recorded no votes for the GOP's candidate, Sen. John McCain, in 2008.

"I'd be surprised if there weren't a handful of precincts that didn't cast a vote for Romney," he said.

Still, the high number of zero precincts in Philadelphia deserves examination, he added.

"Not a single vote for Romney or even an error? That's worth looking into," he said.

In a city with 1,687 of the ward subsets known as divisions, each with hundreds of voters, 59 is about 3.5 percent of the total, Philly.com reported.

Not much has been made about this voting phenomenon by the mainstream media, but we suspect the outrage and uproar would have been loud and boisterous, to say the least, if there were wide swaths of voting districts where not a single Democratic vote was cast.

Critics of voter ID and other laws cracking down on voter fraud claim they’re unnecessary because fraud is nonexistent. For instance, Brennan Center attorneys Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt claimed last year: “A person casting two votes risks jail time and a fine for minimal gain. Proven voter fraud, statistically, happens about as often as death by lightning strike.”

Well, lightning is suddenly all over Cincinnati, Ohio. The Hamilton County Board of Elections is investigating 19 possible cases of alleged voter fraud that occurred when Ohio was a focal point of the 2012 presidential election. A total of 19 voters and nine witnesses are part of the probe.

Democrat Melowese Richardson has been an official poll worker for the last quarter century and registered thousands of people to vote last year. She candidly admitted to Cincinnati’s Channel 9 this week that she voted twice in the last election.

This is how Channel 9′s website summarized the case:

According to county documents, Richardson’s absentee ballot was accepted on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. On Nov. 11, she told an official she also voted at a precinct because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time.

“There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Richardson. . . .

The board’s documents also state that Richardson was allegedly disruptive and hid things from other poll workers on Election Day after another female worker reported she was intimidated by Richardson. . . .

During the investigation it was also discovered that her granddaughter, India Richardson, who was a first time voter in the 2012 election, cast two ballots in November.

Richardson insists she has done nothing wrong and promises to contest the charges: “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States.”

But, of course, as you know there is no voter fraud. Pay no attention to that lightning coming out of Ohio.

The Obama/Biden lawn sign remains proudly planted in front of Melowese Richardson's Cincinnati home, three months after the presidential election.

It seems that President Obama has an especially ardent supporter in the veteran Ohio poll worker.

Richardson told a local television station this month that she voted twice for Obama last November. She cast an absentee ballot and then voted at the polls as well.

"Yes, I voted twice," Richardson told WCPO-TV. "I, after registering thousands of people, certainly wanted my vote to count, so I voted. I voted at the polls."

Authorities also are investigating if she voted in the names of four other people, too, for a total of six votes in the 2012 presidential election.

"I'll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama's right to sit as president of the United States," Richardson vowed when asked about the voter fraud investigation that is now under way.

Richardson is one of 19 people suspected of illegal voting by the Hamilton County Board of Elections in the last election.

"I'm outraged, and every voter, regardless of their political affiliation, should be outraged," said Hamilton County Board of Elections member Alex Triantafilou, who is also chairman of the county Republican Party. "It causes folks to have real doubts about the fabric of our very democratic process, and it's dangerous. It is disconcerting that someone would be so bold as to admit their conduct in such a fashion ... We fully intend to prosecute these cases."

Richardson claimed she had submitted an absentee ballot, but was afraid her vote would not count so she also voted in person. She also said she voted in the name of her granddaughter and yet another person.

"There was absolutely no intent on my part to commit any voter fraud," she insisted.

Richardson's granddaughter, India Richardson, confirmed to Fox News that her grandmother voted for her, by submitting an absentee ballot in her name. India told Fox News that she is not angry, and gave her permission to cast her absentee ballot.

"It wasn't a big deal," she said.

But election authorities say voting more than once, or in someone else's name, is a big deal because it is illegal and threatens the credibility of the nation's election system.

"It appears she not only attempted to vote more than once, but was actually successful at it and having those additional votes counted," Ohio Secretary of State John Husted, who is in charge of the state's elections, told Fox News.

"She appears to have used her position as a poll worker to cover her tracks. That would be someone who is an official in the elections process, using that position to commit a fraud. That is especially troubling to me, as the chief elections officer of the state, because it is my responsibility to make sure the system runs effectively, that it has integrity. When I find issues like this, I know that it undermines voter confidence in our elections, and we must pursue it."

Three other absentee ballots in the names of different people were submitted to the Board of Elections from Richardson's address on Nov. 1. Officials say the handwriting on those ballots is similar and that they were all received together, on the same day that Richardson's absentee ballot arrived at the office. Richardson maintains that some of the other voters live at her house.

Attempts by Fox News to reach Richardson were unsuccessful, but she claimed to the local station that the votes were "absolutely legal votes."

In written reports detailing the 19 cases, Board of Elections investigators described their findings. In one instance, an investigator called a suspected double voter and was hung up on.

"I explained that she voted twice and she told me not to bother her and get off her phone and she hung up," the investigator wrote.

Another voter admitted to double voting, but did not think it was an issue.

"The voter said yes she 'voted early' and then voted again, then she asked 'what's the problem?'" according to the report.

Yet another voter was at a loss for explaining why he voted more than once.

"Voter said he remembered both times. He doesn't know why he voted twice," the report said.

The documents show that another voter said he had received a phone call before Election Day telling him his absentee ballot would not count. When investigators questioned him about voting two times, the voter replied "'as usual, you guys are wrong.' ... he was curious about the investigation and asked 'Now what will you do' and 'are you taping me now?"

The Hamilton County Board of Elections is holding hearings to further investigate these cases.

"It is so fundamental to people's faith in the democratic process, that we need to act very strong to make sure that we are doing everything we can to keep people's faith," declared Triantafilou. "There is always the concern, though, that there are those situations where we didn't catch folks."

As part of a new effort to root out any voter fraud, Secretary of State Husted has ordered all 88 of the state's county Board of Elections to hold public hearings on any credible voter fraud allegations or claims of voter disenfranchisement during the 2012 election. He said any substantiated allegations should be turned over to prosecutors.

"Once the election is over, and once the winner is declared, everybody forgets about it. I want to make sure that we don't forget about it, that we make sure we do, essentially, an audit of that process to ensure that we know what happened, and then use that evidence to guide us going forward. ... We need to learn from that last election so that we can be better before the next one gets here."

"Fraud does happen," noted Husted. "Most attempts are caught by the system. But there are cases that do slip through, as this one does, and we need to make sure that we really send a strong message, that if you do this, you are going to be held accountable. It might mean fines, it might mean jail time."

Voter fraud, said Husted, "undermines public confidence in democracy, and that's why we need, whether you are a Democrat or Republican, to root out all cases of voter fraud."

Melowese Richardson voted a reported six times for President Obama in November of 2012. Twice she used her real name, then another four using the names of her relatives. If convicted she faces a maximum of 12 years in prison.

More disturbing is that Richardson is a long time poll worker and has worked for the Board of Elections in Hamilton County, Ohio since 1998. People like her were watching the polls when President Obama won by close margins, often with "odd" voting totals, in November.

Richardson

Among these statistical anomalies occurred in Pennsylvania, when President Obama received over 99% of vote at polls where GOP inspectors were removed. In addition, in those areas turnout was somehow "30%" above government numbers.

In Cleveland, President Obama won dozens of districts with 100% of the vote. In some populated areas, in fact, Mr. Obama defeated challenger Mitt Romney by an astounding 14,686 to 23.

A jury in South Bend, Indiana has found that fraud put President Obama and Hillary Clinton on the presidential primary ballot in Indiana in the 2008 election. Two Democratic political operatives were convicted Thursday night in the illegal scheme after only three hours of deliberations. They were found guilty on all counts.

Former longtime St. Joseph County Democratic party Chairman Butch Morgan Jr. was found guilty of felony conspiracy counts to commit petition fraud and forgery, and former county Board of Elections worker Dustin Blythe was found guilty of felony forgery counts and falsely making a petition, after being accused of faking petitions that enabled Obama, then an Illinois Senator, to get on the presidential primary ballot for his first run for the White House.

Morgan was accused of being the mastermind behind the plot.

According to testimony from two former Board of Election officials who pled guilty, Morgan ordered Democratic officials and workers to fake the names and signatures that Obama and Clinton needed to qualify for the presidential race. Blythe, then a Board of Elections employee and Democratic Party volunteer, was accused of forging multiple pages of the Obama petitions.

“Their verdict of guilt is not a verdict against Democrats, but for honest and fair elections,” he said.

The scheme was hatched in January of 2008, according to affidavits from investigators who cite former Board of Registration worker Lucas Burkett, who told them he was in on the plan at first, but then became uneasy and quit. He waited three years before telling authorities about it, but if revelations about any forgeries were raised during the election, the petitions could have been challenged during the contest. A candidate who did not qualify with enough legitimate signatures at the time, could have been bounced from the ballot.

The case raise questions about whether in 2008, then candidate Obama actually submitted enough legitimate signatures to have legally qualified for the primary ballot.

“I think had they been challenged successfully, he probably would not have been on the ballot,” Levco told Fox News.

Under state law, presidential candidates need to qualify for the primary ballots with 500 signatures from each of the state's nine congressional districts. Indiana election officials say that in St. Joseph County, which is the 2nd Congressional district, the Obama campaign qualified with 534 signatures; Clinton's camp had 704.

Prosecutors say that in President Obama's case, nine of the petition pages were apparently forged. Each petition contains up to 10 names, making a possible total of 90 names, which, if faked, could have brought the Obama total below the legal limit required to qualify. Prosecutors say 13 Clinton petitions were apparently forged, meaning up to 130 possibly fake signatures. Even if 130 signatures had been challenged, it would have still left Mrs. Clinton with enough signatures to meet the 500 person threshold.

Levco said a total of “100 to 200” signatures had been forged on Obama’s and Clinton’s petitions.

An Indiana State Police investigator said in court papers that the agency examined the suspect Obama petitions and "selected names at random from each of the petition pages and contacted those people directly. We found at least one person (and often multiple people) from each page who confirmed that they had not signed" petitions "or given consent for their name and/or signature to appear."

Numerous voters told Fox News that they never signed the petitions.

"That's not my signature," Charity Rorie, a mother of four, told us when we showed her the Obama petition with her name and signature. She was stunned, saying that it "absolutely" was a fake.

Charity told Fox News that her husband's entry was also a forgery, and that they have never been contacted by investigators or any authorities looking into the scandal.

"It's scary, it's shocking. It definitely is illegal," she told us.

Robert Hunter, Jr. told Fox news that his name was faked, too.

"I did not sign for Barack Obama," he told us. As he examined the Obama petition in his hands, Hunter pointed out that "I always put 'Junior' after my name, every time...there's no 'Junior' there

Even a former Democratic Governor of Indiana, Joe Kernan, told Fox News that his name was forged.

“This is a bitter sweet moment for free and fair elections," observed Ryan Nees, the Indiana born Yale “University senior who first exposed the scheme in the independent political newsletter, Howey Politics Indiana and South Bend Tribune.

Nees said the multiple guilty verdicts were "bitter, because a five-person conspiracy succeeded in illegally placing two presidential candidates on the ballot, but sweet because they were exposed, tried for their crimes, and convicted."

Nees previously told Fox News that the fraud was clearly evident, "because page after page of signatures are all in the same handwriting," and that nobody raised any red flags "because election workers in charge of verifying their validity were the same people faking the signatures."

FAIRFAX, Va. — Four years after the Fairfax County election board began uncovering cases of alleged voter fraud, the local prosecutor has not taken action, and has nothing to say.

More than 200 names were turned over to Commonwealth Attorney Raymond Morrogh for investigation. The names appeared on voter rolls, even though the individuals had excused themselves from jury duty because they were not citizens.

“This should be easy to prosecute,” said Reagan George, director of Virginia Voters Alliance, an election watch group.

But the cases have fallen through bureaucratic cracks in Virginia’s most populous county — and most of the identified aliens remain on the voting rolls.

Fairfax Clerk of Court John Frey said he produced the list of names at the request of the Electoral Board. But neither Frey nor the board has prosecutorial powers in the matter.

According to board records, 278 registered voters did not affirm citizenship, as required, between 2010 and the end of 2011.

Of these, 117 had a history of voting within Virginia.

The Electoral Board referred its findings to Morrogh on four occasions: June 25, 2010; Feb. 28, 2011; May 3, 2011; and Aug. 18, 2011.

Names of an additional 36 non-affirming voters were relayed to the commonwealth attorney March 2, 2012.

Receiving no response from Morrogh, the board stopped sending data to his office.

Brian Schoeneman, secretary of the Electoral Board, said, “One of the most frustrating things is to have evidence that, on its face, justifies further investigation … and then to see zero action.”

“People say there’s no voter fraud because there are no convictions,” noted Schoeneman, a Republican and an attorney.

Election-integrity organizations call the “no-fraud” assertion both misleading and self-fulfilling when prosecutors will not prosecute.

Morrogh, a Democrat, did not respond to Watchdog’s inquiries.

FEELING A CHILL: Catherine Engelbrecht says the U.S. Department of Justice works to “suppress state efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls.”Catherine Engelbrecht, president of the Texas-based group, True the Vote, said the Obama administration has chilled the atmosphere for warranted prosecutions.

“The kind of selective justice being meted out by the Fairfax County prosecutor, though clearly a violation of voters’ rights, is part of the ‘new normal’ standard supported nationwide by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice,” Engelbrecht told Watchdog.

Engelbrecht noted that in 2009, U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandez “set out clear marching orders to all DOJ attorneys — suppress state efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls.”

“They attacked states like Florida and Colorado for even attempting to remove non-citizens from their registry,” she said.

The DOJ justified its approach by arguing that such maintenance procedures would decrease voter turnout.

“But instead it’s engendered a growing outrage among voters who have gotten fed up with the open borders approach to our election system,” Engelbrecht said.

“As a result, demand for basic election integrity policies like photo voter ID is now reaching record levels of popularity.”

“American voters want free and fair elections. The Holder Justice Department wants control. Decisions like that of Fairfax County suggest that county officials fear the power of the DOJ more than they fear the power of people,” she said.

“History will one day reflect that they had it backwards. American voters have had just about enough.”

Article II Section 1 of the Constitution states: “In elections by the people, the qualifications of voters shall be as follows: Each voter shall be a citizen of the United States, shall be 18 years of age, shall fulfill the residence requirements set forth in this section, and shall be registered to vote pursuant to this article.”

Election fraud in Virginia can be classified as a “false statement,” a Class 5 felony punishable by up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $2,500.

Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data.

In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.

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We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.

An alternative approach to reducing non-citizen turnout might emphasize public information. Unlike other populations, including naturalized citizens, education is not associated with higher participation among non-citizens. In 2008, non-citizens with less than a college degree were significantly more likely to cast a validated vote, and no non-citizens with a college degree or higher cast a validated vote. This hints at a link between non-citizen voting and lack of awareness about legal barriers.

There are obvious limitations to our research, which one should take account of when interpreting the results. Although the CCES sample is large, the non-citizen portion of the sample is modest, with the attendant uncertainty associated with sampling error. We analyze only 828 self-reported non-citizens. Self-reports of citizen status might also be a source of error, although the appendix of our paper shows that the racial, geographic, and attitudinal characteristics of non-citizens (and non-citizen voters) are consistent with their self-reported status.

Another possible limitation is the matching process conducted by Catalyst to verify registration and turnout drops many non-citizen respondents who cannot be matched. Our adjusted estimate assumes the implication of a “registered” or “voted” response among those who Catalyst could not match is the same as for those whom it could. If one questions this assumption, one might focus only on those non-citizens with a reported and validated vote. This is the second line of the table.

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Finally, extrapolation to specific state-level or district-level election outcomes is fraught with substantial uncertainty. It is obviously possible that non-citizens in California are more likely to vote than non-citizens in North Carolina, or vice versa. Thus, we are much more confident that non-citizen votes mattered for the Minnesota Senate race (a turnout of little more than one-tenth of our adjusted estimate is all that would be required) than that non-citizen votes changed the outcome in North Carolina.

Our research cannot answer whether the United States should move to legalize some electoral participation by non-citizens as many other countries do, and as some U.S. states did for more than 100 years, or find policies that more effectively restrict it. But this research should move that debate a step closer to a common set of facts.

Jesse Richman is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Old Dominion University, and Director of the ODU Social Science Research Center. David Earnest is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Old Dominion University, and Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters.

Progressives and the Justice Department are doing all they can to stop improvements in election integrity.

By Hans von Spakovsky

Oct. 27, 2014 7:00 p.m. ET

480 COMMENTS

In the past few months, a former police chief in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to voter fraud in a town-council election. That fraud had flipped the outcome of a primary election. Former Connecticut legislator Christina Ayala has been indicted on 19 charges of voter fraud, including voting in districts where she didn’t reside. (She hasn’t entered a plea.) A Mississippi grand jury indicted seven individuals for voter fraud in the 2013 Hattiesburg mayoral contest, which featured voting by ineligible felons and impersonation fraud. A woman in Polk County, Tenn., was indicted on a charge of vote-buying—a practice that the local district attorney said had too long “been accepted as part of life” there.

Now come the midterm elections on Nov. 4. What is the likelihood that your vote won’t count? That your vote will, in effect, be canceled or stolen as a consequence of mistakes by election officials or fraudulent votes cast by campaign workers or ineligible voters like felons and noncitizens?

Unfortunately, we can’t know. But one thing is almost certain: Voter fraud will occur. Many states run a rickety election process, lacking rules to deter people who are looking to take advantage of the system’s porous security. And too many groups and individuals—including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder —are doing everything they can to prevent states from improving the integrity of the election process.

Their refrain is that voter fraud either doesn’t exist or is so insignificant that nothing needs to be done to improve ballot security. Yet in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling that upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged “flagrant examples of such fraud” throughout the nation’s history and observed that “not only is the risk of voter fraud real” but also that “it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

Polling shows that the November general election will likely have many close races, particularly on the local level. Nothing new there. In 2014, 16 local races in Ohio were decided by one vote or through breaking a tie. In 2013, 35 local races in Ohio were that close.

ENLARGE Getty Images .Voting by noncitizens alone could swing such races. A new study by two Old Dominion University professors, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, found that 6.4% of all noncitizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, and 2.2% voted in the 2010 midterms.

Since 80% of noncitizens vote Democratic, according to the survey, the authors concluded that these illegal votes were “large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections.” Those that might have been skewed by noncitizen votes included Al Franken ’s 312-vote win in the Minnesota race for the U.S. Senate. As a senator, Mr. Franken would cast the 60th vote needed to make ObamaCare law.

We’ll never know what role noncitizen voting has played in past elections, but the problem is real. While states like New York ignore this problem, other states have passed rules to deal with it.

In addition to voter ID laws, Kansas and Arizona have put in place new proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration to prevent illegal voting. It is a common-sense and needed reform. In recent weeks North Carolina found more than 100 illegal aliens, still in the country thanks to the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, registered to vote. Yet opponents including the League of Women Voters and Common Cause are challenging citizenship requirements in the courts.

Some states have also tried to eliminate same-day registration, which is a recipe for fraud since it prevents election officials from verifying the eligibility of voters and the accuracy of voter-registration information. States also are reducing early voting days, a relatively new phenomenon that has its share of election-administration problems.

These moves to shore up election integrity have been resisted by progressives at every turn, claiming without evidence that such efforts suppress minority turnout. While the lawsuits have largely failed to overturn the rules, they have succeeded in delaying their implementation and made it costly for states to improve election security. South Carolina’s voter ID law will be in place in the November election, but it cost the state $3.5 million in 2012 to beat Eric Holder’s Justice Department in court. The U.S. Supreme Court just upheld a decision throwing out an injunction against a Texas voter ID law, which was in place in state elections in 2013 and primary elections this year.

North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin are still battling progressives and the Justice Department in court over their election rules, although North Carolina and Ohio also got favorable decisions from the Supreme Court, allowing them to implement their rules for this election cycle. As John Fund and I outline in our new book on Attorney General Holder, the Justice Department refuses to enforce the federal law requiring states to keep accurate voter rolls—even though a 2012 Pew study found that the rolls are riddled with errors and ineligible voters.

How far are some liberals willing to go in undermining ballot integrity? This month, the conservative guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe caught a director of the “social change” organization Work for Progress and an employee for the Greenpeace environmental group voicing their approval of absentee-ballot theft and fraudulent voting in Colorado. Recent polls indicate that the state’s governor and U.S. Senate races are statistical ties.

Greenpeace fired the worker who was caught approving voter fraud, but too many on the left shrug at the prospect of tainted elections. At a Cincinnati “voting rights” rally in March, Rev. Al Sharpton and other liberal activists celebrated Melowese Richardson, who was convicted last year of voter fraud by using her position as a poll worker to vote more than once in the 2012 presidential election. Her five-year prison sentence was amended to five years of probation earlier this year—a delayed wrist-slap that further erodes respect for the ballot box.

For too long, America has basically used the honor system in the voter-registration and election process. That approach is increasingly being revealed as indefensible in a vibrant democracy, where we should make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

Mr. von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow and former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, is the co-author, with John Fund, of “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department” (HarperCollins/Broadside 2014).

Democrats want everyone to vote: old, young, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, citizen, non-citizen. Wait, what was that last one again? We’ll get to that.

Voter-ID laws, passed by thirty states so far, are efforts by legislatures to ensure the integrity of votes. Being asked to show a photo ID can diminish several kinds of fraud, including impersonation, duplicate registrations in different jurisdictions, and voting by ineligible people including felons and non-citizens.

The Democrats have made a number of arguments against voter-ID laws. They argue a) that the problem of voter impersonation or in-person voter fraud is nonexistent; b) that black and poor voters are more likely than others to lack a valid ID; and c) that Republicans are attempting to “suppress” the votes of Democratic constituencies in a bid to revive Jim Crow.

To believe a), you must assume that Americans, who engage in widespread tax evasion (an estimated $2 trillion in income goes unreported), insurance fraud (an estimated $80 billion dollar’s worth in 2006), identity theft (15 million victims annually), and thousands of other deceptions and crimes large and small are perfect angels when they step into the voting booth. Vote fraud simply “doesn’t exist,” pronounced Attorney General Eric Holder.

It’s extremely difficult to track vote fraud. Most states put only half-hearted efforts into purging their voter-registration rolls of the dead or those who’ve moved out of state. Prosecutions for vote fraud are rare. But prosecutions for perjury are rare, too — and not because it “doesn’t exist.” Earlier this year, the Virginia Voters Alliance found that more than 44,000 people were simultaneously registered to vote in Maryland and Virginia. Catherine Englebrecht’s True the Vote found some 6.9 million overlapping voter registrations in the 28 states they examined. For those unburdened by conscience who live close to the border, it’s more than possible to vote early and often.

Being registered in more than one jurisdiction doesn’t prove that you committed fraud, only that you’ve arranged things to permit it or that you’ve overlooked, perhaps by absent-mindedness, this detail of good citizenship. But persuasive evidence that vote fraud is both real and consequential has appeared. A new academic paper published in the journal Electoral Studies provides evidence of voting by non-citizens that directly contradicts the Democrats’ “nothing to see here” mantra. Under the neutral headline “Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections?” three professors from Virginia universities answer in the affirmative. Using an enormous database of voters nationwide (32,800 from 2008, and 55,400 in 2012), the authors find that about one-quarter of the non-citizens who participated in the survey were registered to vote.

In many states, their participation wouldn’t be large enough to make a difference, but in North Carolina in 2008, the authors calculate, non-citizens may well have tipped the state into Obama’s column. “So what?” you may say. Even if John McCain had won that state, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the national election. True, but remember the presidential race in 2000? Remember “hanging chad” Florida?

Several House seats, and one very significant Senate seat, were probably won by Democrats on the strength of illegal votes. In 2008, the authors note, Senator Al Franken won by just 312 votes in Minnesota. That seat was the sixtieth vote to give Democrats a filibuster-proof supermajority to pass major legislation such as Obamacare. “[Voting] participation by just 0.65 percent of non-citizens in Minnesota is sufficient to account for the entirety of Franken’s margin,” the authors write. “Our best guess is that nearly ten times as many voted.”

Voter-ID laws will not prevent non-citizens from voting. Green-card holders and even illegal aliens get driver’s licenses. But that’s not an argument against voter ID. It’s an argument for issuing driver’s licenses that specify non-citizenship.

As for blacks being “targeted” by voter-ID laws, a study by Reuters found almost no difference (2 versus 3 percent) in the number of white and black voters who lacked ID.

Voting is a semi-sacred act of civic religion. Trust that only those eligible are determining our future as a nation is the foundation of civic peace. Voter-ID laws should be just one part of ensuring voter integrity. When Democrats resist those measures, it only feeds suspicion that they’re trying to steal elections.

— Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

One of the critical firewalls for the Romney campaign in 2012 was the (apparently mistaken) belief that Florida voters had turned sour on President Obama. The state’s demographics, including a surging older population seemed to seal the deal. In the RealClearPolitics final poll of polls before the election, Romney led by a small but significant 1.5%. In three of the six last polls, he led by as much as 6%, with one tied and Obama up in two polls by 1% and 2% respectively.

However, when the votes started pouring in, a different story was told. There was Karl Rove’s insistence that Romney was going to win the state, even as FoxNews called it for Obama.

The final totals came in slowly and Obama seemed to creep up in the totals as the night went on.

ve Been Elected With Illegal VotesJudicial Watch ^ | 10/28/14 | staff Posted on October 28, 2014 at 9:06:26 PM EDT by Nachum

A large number of non-citizens cast ballots in U.S. elections and it’s possible that the illegal votes were responsible for President Obama’s 2008 victory, according to an in-depth academic study that confirms Judicial Watch’s assessment that foreign nationals have helped Democrats steal elections.

Non-citizens tend to favor Democrats and Obama won more than 80% of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 sample gathered by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a large-scale academic survey project operated by teams of researchers from across the country. In fact, enough ineligible voters cast ballots in 2008 to conceivably account for Democratic victories in a few close elections, CCES researchers found. A respected Ivy League professor is coordinator of the CCES which has produced national sample surveys, stratified by state and type of district, in every federal election since 2006. This allows the optimal study of congressional and state races as well as an ideal setting for understanding the relationship between the congressional and presidential elections.

The CCES is an esteemed and highly respected operation that recently published shocking information, gathered from big social science survey datasets, that supports Judicial Watch’s work in this area. In 2012 JW launched the Election Integrity Project, a widespread legal campaign to clean up voter registration rolls and support election integrity measures across the country. Our investigations immediately uncovered data that proved voter rolls in a number of states—including Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Florida, California and Colorado—contained the names of individuals who are ineligible to vote.

Now the CCES confirms this, specifically that large numbers of foreign nationals vote in U.S. elections. The “participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections,” according to a mainstream newspaper article written by two of

At a Tuesday evening campaign event for Mary Burke, Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, President Barack Obama encouraged voters to participate in early voting.

"One week, Wisconsin. One week. One week from today you get to choose a new governor. And because early voting runs through this Friday, you don't have to wait until election day," Obama told the crowd in Milwaukee.

"You can vote all week," Obama added.

"I mean you can only vote once, this isn't Chicago now," Obama told the crowd, laughing.

"I'm teasing Chicago, I'm messing with you. That was a long time ago," Obama added.

One of the critical firewalls for the Romney campaign in 2012 was the (apparently mistaken) belief that Florida voters had turned sour on President Obama. The state’s demographics, including a surging older population seemed to seal the deal. In the RealClearPolitics final poll of polls before the election, Romney led by a small but significant 1.5%. In three of the six last polls, he led by as much as 6%, with one tied and Obama up in two polls by 1% and 2% respectively.

However, when the votes started pouring in, a different story was told. There was Karl Rove’s insistence that Romney was going to win the state, even as FoxNews called it for Obama.

The final totals came in slowly and Obama seemed to creep up in the totals as the night went on.

Obama’s total margin of victory was 74,309. it was small but enough to avoid a recount, especially with the rest of the country clinching 270 electoral vote for him.

But was it a victory that was earned?

(Excerpt) Read more at thepunditpress.com ...

Romney lost FL because voters in Lee County had to stand in line for up to SIX TO SEVEN HOURS to vote. Look it up - longest wait in the nation. This county went 55% Romney back in 2012... and on a rainy cold Nov Tuesday, you make the elderly wait for 7 hours to vote?

A massive investigation is underway in Tarrant County as law enforcement officers from the Texas Attorney General’s Office investigate a vote-harvesting scheme alleged to involve as many as 20,000 ballots.

The investigation was the result of a complaint filed by Aaron Harris, of Direct Action Texas, an organization that also uncovered significant errors in Hill County’s primary election results.

Today, Harris confirmed that AG investigators have been spotted on the ground in Tarrant County interviewing witnesses. In a statement released online, Harris claimed the investigation is into a vote harvesting scheme involving as many as 20,000 ballots.

I don't know if this has been mentioned in the previous posts, but remember those Black Panther thug scum that stood outside voting centers. AND THEY WERE ARMED!!! FFS. They would intimidate anyone coming in to vote republican when Obummer was first running. Don't say it had no effect. Little old grandma headed down to vote at the site of these thugs, turned and headed home. So this time out it will be both BLM and the Black panther scum. And no one did anything then, not will they this time around. Crazy ass country this is sometimes.